The Joy Of Being Together

Musings from a podcaster on vacation

I’m writing to you today from Altea, Spain, a beach town in the southeastern province of Alicante. As it is solidly touristic collar season, and a weekday, I’m joined mostly by Northern Europeans over the age of sixty and construction workers preparing for the summer ahead.

I’m nearing the end of a two-week trip with friends from college, which we planned well before FiveThirtyEight went under and I launched this Substack/indie podcast, so I won’t have a second podcast in the feed this week. My apologies for disrupting the publishing schedule this early on, but friendship commitments call and I promise the hamster wheel of politics will continue apace as soon as I’m back next week.

Nonetheless, I hope you don’t mind if I share some vibes-based thoughts with you all from my travels.

First, I don’t have any profound conclusions on the differences between Europe and America. I lived in Spain, Italy, and Turkey at different points between 2005 and 2011 and, if anything, Europe has become less foreign since then. Unlimited Wi-Fi and avocados are no longer difficult to come by. Drying machines are still a rarity, but when you’ve been eating as much jamón as I have, stretched out air-dried jeans are more of an asset than a drawback.

I also, for what it’s worth, don’t find Europeans’ (generally negative) stereotypes of Americans all that convincing. In my observation, many of these stereotypes come from watching Americans on vacation or study abroad programs in big cities where most of the people around them aren’t on vacation or studying abroad. Having spent a lot of time in Southern Europe, where Europeans themselves go on vacation, and having attended a university in Istanbul that attracted Erasmus students from across the continent, I can tell you that such behavior does not discriminate. Vacationers and college students on both sides of the Atlantic can be loud, drunk, and flashy.

Listeners to the podcast also know that as much as contemporary American politics have rattled Europe, I would again emphasize similarities. In some ways, America is catching up to a place that various European countries have been for decades: a politics driven by debates over national identity, culture, and nostalgia.

I also find the American Left’s (generally positive) stereotypes of Europe to be misplaced. If one is going to draw comparisons, it should be between two similarly-scaled things. The appropriate comparison point to Denmark is metropolitan Boston. The appropriate comparison point to the United States is the whole of the European Union, which, yes, includes a high density mid-rise urban dreamscape of accessible healthcare and high speed trains, but also includes a lot of poverty, poor infrastructure, and nationalism.

I’m here to tell Europeans and Americans that, for better or worse, we aren’t so different.

However, I have long held these personal frustrations with stereotypes on both sides of the Atlantic, so what have the past two weeks actually impressed upon me? Allow me to make a hard pivot here from the contrarian to the earnest. More than anything, this trip has emphasized, for me, the joy of being together.

I’ve spent almost every moment of the past two weeks in the presence of my friends from college. We survived an Iberian Peninsula-wide blackout on 30 euros split between five people, we hiked the Pyrenees to exhaustion, and we cheered on Coco Gauff despite her loss to Aryna Sabalenka in the Madrid Open championship. It’s fun to be on vacation, but the real pleasure was spending so many of my waking hours with people I know and love.

Folks who have been listening to the podcast for a while know that loneliness and the disintegration of community is one of the trends in American life that concerns me most. (Just last week, I had on a former pastor who made the case for going to church just for the community even if one doesn’t believe in God.) To pull back the curtain here, it’s also one of the things that I’ve thought most about in my own life while starting the GD POLITICS venture. Pre-covid, the FiveThirtyEight newsroom was my most regular form of community. Post-covid, that consistency was lost, but I still worked with people whose company I enjoyed.

GD POLITICS, at least so far, is very much a solo experience. I get to talk to people I respect on a weekly basis, but the vast majority of my working life is now spent alone in my apartment. I don’t think that's good for me or the podcast longterm, and I am thinking about ways of changing it. I also hope to eventually get to a place with the podcast where I can hire colleagues. But, in the meantime, the past two weeks have made me incredibly grateful for the community that I do have. I am lucky to have close friends and I am also very lucky to have you, dear reader/listener.

After a day of hiking last week, my friend posted a picture on Instagram of the five of us at our destination point with a sticker that read “my crew.” I reposted it unthinkingly, but it elicited a decent amount of feedback on the importance of close friendships. One follower wrote: “As someone who is severely crew-less, this brings me vicarious joy; enjoy your GD weekend, sir.” I read the comment out loud to the friends I’m traveling with and one of them burst into tears.

I know there are too many people like that follower out there. I know that for myself, being single and working solo – even with close friends – is a precarious spot to be in. It’s a topic I want to keep covering, because I think it’s important, but also because I do think it shapes our politics.

I said that I don’t have any profound conclusions on the differences between Europe and America, but one thing you immediately notice about Spain, particularly Madrid, is the amount of people’s lives spent with others out in public – at bars, restaurants, parks, and the like. I don’t know if this is a difference between the two continents, because I feel a similar way about how people live life in New York City, but my experiences with Los Angeles and London suggest that some cities have cultures more centered on gathering privately in people’s homes.

In any case, during last week’s blackout, I ended up at Plaza Olavide in Madrid, where hundreds of people were gathered outside eating, drinking, and singing popular songs in Spanish. My crew spent its 30 euros buying up the remnants of a nearby corner store. We ate a dinner of chips, cheese, and cured meat on a suitcase, while watching the scene play out around us. Though I didn’t know the songs, like the follower who wrote to me, I felt the vicarious joy of the plaza’s togetherness. It’s also a joy I’ve felt being surrounded by my own close friends this past week.

I don’t have immediate answers as to how to increase that feeling in my own work life or in American life, but I find myself in a position with GD POLITICS to spend some time investigating. And I plan to. For now, I want to thank you dear reader/listener for being a part of my GD POLITICS community. My friends are down at the beach and it’s time for me to go join them.